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Growing Up features Oxford professor Richard Dawkins' five one-hour lectures, originally televised by the BBC, for The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children, founded by Michael Faraday in 1825. Dawkins offers "a series of lectures on life, the universe, and our place in it. With brilliance and clarity, Dawkins unravels an educational gem that will mesmerize young and old alike. Illuminating demonstrations, wildlife, virtual reality, and special guests (including Douglas Adams) all combine to make this collection a timeless classic."

While it is a sad state of affairs that we still, in the year 2007, live in a markedly paternalistic society, I recognize that this is a fact of life that will take some time to change. Still, the current Supreme Court decision is notable in its combination of relying heavily on such a paternalistic line of reasoning while eschewing basic legal scholarship in the process.

Yes, yes, love can warp your perception, too. Still, there is an apprehension of the other — an empathetic understanding — that is at least humanly possible, and it would never have gotten off the ground had love not emerged on this planet as a direct result of Darwinian logic.

Some people, on hearing this, remain stubbornly ungrateful. They hate the arbitrariness of it all. You mean I love my child just because she’s got my genes? So my “appreciation” of her “specialness” is an illusion?

Transcending the arbitrary narrowness of our empathy isn’t guaranteed by nature. (Why do you think they call it transcendence?) But nature has given us the tools — not just the empathy, but the brains to figure out how evolution works, and thus to see that the narrowness is arbitrary.

So evolution has led to something outside itself — to the brink of a larger, more widely illuminating love, maybe even to a glimpse of moral truth. What’s not to like?

Jeff Sharlet (of The Reveler blog, listed on this site in the "Good News" blogroll) writes in Rolling Stone (link to excerpt) about BattleCry, a project of a Christian fundamentalist, Ron Luce of Teen Mania, for radicalizing evangelical Christian teenagers through massive multi-media rallies and his Honor Academy. Luce "isn't just looking for followers -- he wants 'stalkers' who'll bring a criminal passion to their pursuit of godliness."

Both the rallies and the Honor Academy are marked by ultra-aggressive indoctrination and create an ask-no-questions atmosphere.

Luce calls his crusade a "counter-rebellion" or a "reverse rebellion" or sometimes simply "revolution." The Cleveland event, Acquire the Fire, only one stop in what is becoming Luce's permanently touring roadshow, is not meant to save souls...but to radicalize them. He's been doing this for two decades, but it didn't take off until days after the Columbine shootings of 1999, when Luce rallied 70,000 angry, weeping kids at the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. In 2006, he brought his rallies to more than 200,000 kids. Overall, he's preached to 12 million.

They're the base. Of that number, Luce has sent 53,000 teen missionaries around the globe to preach spiritual "purity" -- chastity, sobriety and a commitment to laissez-faire capitalism -- in Romania, Guatemala and dozens of other "strongholds" that require young Americans to bring them "freedom" -- a Christ they believe needs no translation.

Sharlet's descriptions of the rallies are alone worth the price of this issue of Rolling Stone. But Sarlet also visits the Honor Academy for a week when it features special guest,

Rebecca Contreraas, a pretty, thirty-eight-year-old professional evangelist...who was a special assistant to President Bush in his first term. She was responsible for 1,200 presidential appointments, an impressive job considering she had not gone to college.

must log at least thirty-one hours a week working for the cause [of BattleCry]. Around seventy...learn how to produce visual media of sufficient quality that in the four years since Luce hired [former VH1 producer Doug] Rittenhouse, several of his proteges have started climbing the ranks in secular media, fulfilling Luce's "infiltration" dream. Most, however,...spend their days cold-calling youth pastors to sell them blocks of tickets to upcoming events or counseling would-be teen missionaries by phone on how to raise the funds to pay for a trip through [Luce's] Global Expeditions.

Sharlet's article is a must-read.

BattleCry was also the topic of an opinion piece--which while informed and interesting does utilize name-calling--on the website TruthDig.

Bush-Cheney campaign youth organizer Jordan Sekulow, speaking minutes before the Detroit "BattleCry" event on live television, described the political impact and eventual benefit his party gains from evangelical teens like those who participate in Teen Mania's programs.

Contradictions within movements are nothing new on the political scene, but Gilgoff really mines the ins-and-outs of this particular one in an objective fashion, separating the ideology from the method, in a way that makes The Jesus Machine about much, much more than simply Dobson, Focus on the Family or the politicization of the evangelical movement. He looks at some of the top-down models that worked and those that failed. He examines the creation of the Family Research Council and its Family Policy Councils at the state level that helped to distance Dobson from the day-to-day political mechanics, and the issues for which the bottom-up organizing were most effective. He looks at the rivalry and chase for the same donor dollars between the overlapping groups and at the ways the competition was resolved – or not – between them.

One of the important refrains of Chip Berlet, Frederick Clarkson, Joan Bokaer, and others active in fighting to reclaim ideas of American citizenship and history from the religious right (and doing so without demonizing people, including conservative Christians) is simply "Organize, organize, organize." It is a refrain of most great civil rights activists, past and present. A great theme of the presentations and panels at the historic first "Dominionism, Political Power, and the Theocratic Right" conference in May, 2005 (at The Graduate Center in New York City) was that numerous leaders of the religious right openly state that they learned their lessons about successful political organization from studying the civil rights movement. The religious right is a political movement involving electoral politics, which requires organization.

Thus the importance of the analysis offered by books like The Jesus Machine.

Thus the importance of youractiveparticipation in the movement to educate others about and to help reverse the excesses of the religious right.

From the diary/post in part about a Barna Research Group poll (now quite dated) about divorce. Barna

had interviewed 3,854 adults from the 48 contiguous states. The margin of error is within 2 percentage points. The survey found: 11% of the adult population is currently divorced. 25% of adults have had at least one divorce during their lifetime. Divorce rates among conservative Christians were significently (sic) higher than for other faith groups, and for Atheists and Agnostics.

The statistics about divorce rates are complex. But, I believe that the high divorce rates among Americans who also happen to be self-described as conservative Christians is interesting at least insofar as such Americans--like the religious right in general--are also statistically more likely to object to extending to same-sex couples the rights, responsibilities, and benefits (legal, economic, and presumably psychological) of marriage, civil unions, or domestic partnerships.

The diary is best appreciated, I feel, in light of the comments it generated. Divorce is a usually painful experience almost never looked-for or expected by any couple who gets married, atheist, Christian, Jewish, rich, poor, or anything else.

Florida lawyer David C. Gibbs III, general counsel for the Christian Law Association (and son of its founder David Gibbs Jr.), received national attention for his role representing Terri Schiavo’s parents. Where is he now? Trying to prevent students at Okeechobee High School from convening a gay-straight alliance (GSA) club.

According to the AHA, humanism is "a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment, aspiring to humanity’s greater good."

From the poster about the conference at Harvard, "The New Humanism," April 20 - 22. (Registration here.) (The the post for the list of special guests ranging from A. O. Wilson to Ned Lamont.)

The Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard has long been among those representing a non-religious philosophy that is much more than anti-religiosity......One billion people around the world, 30-40 million Americans, and 1 in 5 Americans age 18-25......If you call yourself: Atheist, Agnostic,...Non-Religious, Freethinker,...Rationalist, Secular, Spiritual, Skeptic, Cynic, Secular Humanist, Naturalist, Deist, 'Nothing,' or any number of non-religious descriptives, you could probably count yourself a humanist.

The reaction of Pharyngula to Greg Epstein of the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard was disappointing, but perhaps forgivably so, since the journalist reporting on the story of the "new humanism" messed up the quote attributed to Epstein, a quote that made it seem as if Epstein categorized Richard Dawkins as a fundamentalist. (Regardless, the name-calling--i.e., Pharyngula calling Epstein a moron--is mean-spirited. Such tactics should be rejected.) Pharyngula, the blog of Paul Zachary Myers of the Univ of Minnesota, has been an excellent defender of science education against Creationism and the supposed science dubbed "Intelligent Design," or "ID," which is basically dressed-up Creationism.

But, the personal attacks against religious people, including religious moderates, has got to stop. I no more blame Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins for the rhetorical excesses of some of their fans than I blame Darwin for the crackpot "social Darwinism" invented by his brother. Still, I think we're reaching a point where the debate among the political progressive coalition that includes the religious and non-religious would benefit from a demonstration by perhaps Harris in particular that for the atheist, pluralism and democracy can and should be valued. In general, I think Dawkins has been a bit better about this. I notice that on his foundation's blog he now has up his interview with his sometimes political ally, the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries. I could be wrong, but I suspect Harris would be highly unlikely to team up with any sort of cleric for anything. We'll see.